HAS IT ALL BECOME MUCH TOO FAST NOW? You can hear this faint alarm bell of anxiety ringing in the title of John Brockman's thought-provoking collection of essays, How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? (Note the implication: the internet is m

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You can hear this faint alarm bell of anxiety ringing in the title of John Brockman's thought-provoking collection of essays, How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? (Note the implication: the internet is moulding us, not the other way around.)...Thankfully, many of Edge's essayists violently disagree with each other. To some, the internet is "a work of genius, one of the highest achievements of the human species" (Richard Dawkins) and "the most human of technologies" (the historian Noga Arikha). To others, it is "the greatest detractor to serious thinking since the invention of the television" (the neurobiologist Leo Chalupa) and "nothing more... than a very useful, and very dumb, butler" (the neuroscientist Joshua Greene). .. The essays are peppered with insights. These include a theory that virtual cities will encourage states of psychosis, as real cities already do, and the observation that what we call old media (books, newspapers, television) are, in fact, very recent inventions, whereas websites based on communal sharing, such as Facebook, signal a return to prehistoric, tribal patterns of communication